I’ve been thinking a lot about time and task lately. Partly it’s because for the past few weeks I’ve been having trouble managing my time to get my tasks done. I suspect this is a common problem for people who work from home, especially writers, artists, and musicians. We spend our days (or nights) trying to fit our assignments, or tasks, around appointments, classes, and events that are scheduled at a particular time. The spigot of creativity and word flow gets turned off, and when it is turned back on, the gush has been reduced to a trickle. There are times when I hear “Time’s winged chariot,” and I want to be seduced like Marvell’s mistress and surrender to the moment. Forget work. I want to read a novel.

What’s this, another post? That’s right reader I don’t go back to work until Wednesday and I’m bored. I’m also pissed off.

Now lots of things annoy me, from hipsters to bad grammar (oh yes I am the life of any party) but few things make me genuinely angry.

The first thing that makes me genuinely angry is the coalition lie that public spending under the New Labour government is the reason the UK has such a large deficit. This is not true, not even a little bit. EMA, Academies, nurses and teacher pensions did not put this country into the red. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars did.

Now I am not going to make a moralistic stand on whether or not we were right to join America in it’s terrorist hunt in the middle east although I might point out that Iraq is over a 1000 miles from Pakistan…

An altered look about the hills—
A Tyrian light the village fills—
A wider sunrise in the morn—
A deeper twilight on the lawn—
A print of a vermillion foot—
A purple finger on the slope—
A flippant fly upon the pane—
A spider at his trade again—
An added strut in Chanticleer—
A flower expected everywhere—
An axe shrill singing in the woods—
Fern odors on untravelled roads—
All this and more I cannot tell—
A furtive look you know as well—
And Nicodemus’ Mystery
Receives its annual reply!

“An altered look about the hills” at first seems only to present a collage of springtime images, but by the poem’s end, we discover a speaker considering larger theological questions. The accumulation of observable details and recurring syntactical patterns in the first two-thirds of the poem delay the surprise of the pattern’s dramatic variation in the final four…

Not only politicians, but also the media, often use euphemisms to soften the truth and camouflage hard realities. Civilians killed in wars are called “collateral damage.” No one’s rich or poor, anymore. Soldiers don’t suffer shellshock, but post-traumatic stress disorder.

This report from Russian TV examines the bureaucratic “newspeak,” invoking George Carlin in the process. Of course, Russian politicians and media are just as adept as their American counterparts in lying to the public.

Vulgarity and obscenity are two adjectives often associated in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”.Many people perceive his use of strong, sexual imagery to be gratuitous and frivolous. The opinion that this work is more akin to an Alice Cooper, or Marilyn Manson, designed to shock and disgust with little to no merit, is not uncommon. I, too, have been tempted to dismiss Ginsberg as a “shock jock” of sorts but to do so may be selling this work short. “Howl” is obscene. “Howl” is vulgar. However, “Howl” needs to be crass and rude to have the impact that Ginsberg had intended.

To begin, I would like define the words obscene and vulgar. Obscene, according to Merriam-Webster, is defined as “repulsive by reason of crass disregard of moral or ethical principles” (“Obscene” Def. 2c). Vulgar can also be defined as “generally used” (“Vulgar” Def. 1a), or “of the usual” (“Vulgar”…

"Great writers are indecent people. They live unfairly, saving the best part for paper. Good human beings save the world so that bastards like me can keep creating art, become immortal. if you read this after I am dead it means I made it." - Charles Bukowski